Commercials gone wild

The norwegian website Propaganda has an article out (norwegian) on how commercials now can be distributed through the net and can reach millions of people without the need of televison stations or cable companies. I used the fantastic Volkswagen commercials featuring Peter Stormare to illustrate this fact in my presentation at the Nordic Media Festival, and Propaganda asked me some questions. They have summarized the issues nicely in their article, but I have a couple of points to add…

Last year I posted a short article on the BMW commercial featuring Kermit the frog. A friend of mine, John Andreas Andersen was the cinematographer and I posted a couple of details from the production. At that point John Andreas had a very cool “making of” movie on his web site, but had to take it down after a cease and desist from Disney. Owners of everything regarding the little green celebrity frog.

Ever since, the search “BMW kermit” has been one of the most frequent searches that drives traffic from Google to my blog.

People have a genuine interest for this commercial. They miss the behind the scenes movie and want to know more. BMW hasn’t done anything about this fact. They have a huge audience that want their commercial. Seems like a dream for any marketer.

The making of is up on YouTube (at least at the time of writing this).

BMW had a huge success with BMW Films. A true example of how it is possible to reach out with commercials that people really want. The movies was made for distribution through the internet. They were so popular that they ended up screening them at cinemas in the US and selling a DVD with a collection of all the movies.

What happened to the Kermit spot? Why didn’t they buy the rights to the “making of”? Why is there no information about this spot on bmw.com? What should they have done?

Do like Sony

Their beautiful Bravia advert has been debated and praised by highly trafficed web sites. There is a big interest in the commercial and Sony has done something to meet this interest. They have put up www.bravia-advert.com. A web site with one mission, information and downloads regarding this particular ad. A look at the traffic rank for this site on Alexa reveals that making this site probably has paid off hugely.

I have never seen this commercial on regular TV. Still I know everything about it and have seen it several times on the net. Right now it has 3,4 million views alone on YouTube.

Welcome to a new world of distribution, marketing and the art of getting attention… More on this when I reach that chapter in my series of articles from my presentation at the Nordic Media Festival.